Objects of Obsession

Miroslav Tichý was born in 1926 in what is now the Czech Republic and studied painting at the Academy of Art in Prague. He was arrested in the 1960s and was thrown in prison camp for eight years for no particular reason other than that he was "different" and was considered subversive. After his release he lived in near-isolation in his hometown of Kyjov, and spent his days taking photos of women using cameras inventively constructed from found materials—shoeboxes, tin cans, clothing elastic, toilet paper rolls, even cigarette boxes. The result is works of strikingly unusual formal qualities, which disregard the rules of conventional photography.